Les Miserables
May. 24th, 2019 04:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
potentiality_26So. Having finished the BBC adaptation of Les Miserables, there are a couple of things I want to say right off.
1) Enzo Cilenti should have held out for a bigger part. He's the light of this production and he does nothing. I quite shipped his character with Javert as well, especially toward the end. Very sad.
2) Clearly I was right not to talk too much about it before seeing the whole thing. I've had time to forget a lot of my more minor gripes and to focus on broader issues, and I did think the last episode was really very good. It was kept from being great, imo, by the problems the adaptation had had throughout and by the general "eh" feeling of the ending, but it was good.
3) I've had to ask myself if it is in fact possible to make the end of this story uplifting without the spirits of the dead singing a rousing chorus about freedom, and I just don't know. I've seen the 1934 French version, and 1935 version with Charles Laughton, and 1978 version with Anthony Perkins (it occurs to me that I only ever remember who played Javert), and I don't strongly remember the end of any of them. The end of the 1998 version is memorable only because they made the executive decision to cut it short, and maybe that's fair.
Anyway, uplifting was not achieved, but I say again that the last episode was very good. I also liked a lot of the casting, especially Enzo Cilenti once again, and the genetically improbable Thenardier family. Really good performances all around there. I enjoyed the Waterloo opening as well.
But I do still have complaints. They are as follows:
First of all, obviously they changed a lot of small things from the book for this production. I respect that this needs to be done, but a lot of the changes just... weren't better. One that caught me early on is a scene from Fantine's storyline where one of the other girls (I think Favourite?) tells her that the men they're seeing aren't serious about them and it's just... it's a bad choice. The tone of the scene when the guys ditch them and say it's their "surprise" works because the other women, who likely assumed Fantine was on the same page, are all "LOL good joke" and get over it while Fantine sits there going "Oh shit." It's not young love or naivety anymore if she was warned and let him persuade her otherwise, it's just sad. Generally there are a lot of similar little changes that I just don't feel work very well. Some of it, as I said in an earlier post, is me being a nerd- but I don't think that all it is.
Of all the "off" parts of it, some of the very worst comes through Javert's characterization. David Oyelowo gives a hell of a performance, but they literally couldn't have made the character more one note. When in doubt, everything Javert does is about Valjean. To an extent that you wonder how Javert got up in the morning all those years Valjean was in the convent. It gets successively more cartoonish until the crowning moment, the cherry on the sundae, wherein Javert concludes that Jean Vajean must have started the June Rebellion. This is especially funny in contrast to Valjean, who seems to always live in hope that it won't be Javert. Like the students are talking about a police spy and you can see Valjean's little wheels turning, where he's like "Maybe it's not Javert, it can't always be him, that's statistically improbable... Oh, it's him, though. It's him."
Also a bit silly is the constant repetition of how Valjean stole a Coin from a Child. I know that happened, but... it's a moment for Valjean to look at himself and think, "I really have fallen far." It serves this really cool double purpose where it makes what the bishop did even more meaningful, in the sense that under slightly different circumstances it could have been for nothing, and he knew that but did it anyway, but also less meaningful in the sense that the bishop can talk all he wants about how Valjean belongs to God now, but in the end Valjean still has to make that choice himself. It's one thing the musical misses, and it's important- but not so important that you have to harp on it until it becomes a joke. I couldn't stop thinking about just how Javert, hot on the trail of the supervillain Valjean, interviewed that child.
And finally, I want to talk about the plot structure. In a way, I want to thank Andrew Davies, or whoever it was who first decided "I will make a timeline of everything that happens in this gigantic tome, and I will film it chronologically", because I've been thinking about the ideal adaptation of this book for fifteen years, and I needed to see it done like this to know that it wouldn't work. I actually really like most of Davies' adaptations (his Sense & Sensibility is good, for example, if a bit Extra- a duel, really?) and I found myself comparing this in particular to Little Dorrit, which is probably my favorite of his. The books are superficially similar- they hang around one protagonist (Valjean, Amy) but have a large cast of other characters connected often in obscure ways- and yet trying to treat them the same way falls really flat. Dickens starts with a wide net and eventually draws it tight; Hugo starts with a slender thread (so slender he spends chapters and chapters on characters you'll never see again) and eventually throws it wide enough to cover a city.
It does the story an enormous disservice to give Marius' sad background the same weight as Valjean and then Fantine's core plotline- which, by just throwing everything at you chronologically, is exactly what this adaptation does. Deliver that background as a flashback when Marius gets important, or don't have it at all. (Though I admit, it would be a shame to lose the saga of Gillenormand's maid, who's definitely the MVP of the household.) Since the story of his father gets re-explained once he's an adult anyway, it isn't critical, it's just part of this larger decision to frame Les Miserables as a sprawling ensemble piece in a way that it just isn't. These moments are not of equal importance and it muddies the waters dangerously to act as if they are. My smaller gripes about changes to the story aside, that's the main issue with this adaptation, and it's the main reason it gets better towards the end. Towards the end everything is of equal importance, and beautifully handled at that. So I'm glad I got there, but it was a bumpy road.
TL;DR I love the book, I love the musical, and I liked this adaptation toward the end and maybe overall I judged it too harshly. If you haven't seen it, please don't hesitate on my account.
1) Enzo Cilenti should have held out for a bigger part. He's the light of this production and he does nothing. I quite shipped his character with Javert as well, especially toward the end. Very sad.
2) Clearly I was right not to talk too much about it before seeing the whole thing. I've had time to forget a lot of my more minor gripes and to focus on broader issues, and I did think the last episode was really very good. It was kept from being great, imo, by the problems the adaptation had had throughout and by the general "eh" feeling of the ending, but it was good.
3) I've had to ask myself if it is in fact possible to make the end of this story uplifting without the spirits of the dead singing a rousing chorus about freedom, and I just don't know. I've seen the 1934 French version, and 1935 version with Charles Laughton, and 1978 version with Anthony Perkins (it occurs to me that I only ever remember who played Javert), and I don't strongly remember the end of any of them. The end of the 1998 version is memorable only because they made the executive decision to cut it short, and maybe that's fair.
Anyway, uplifting was not achieved, but I say again that the last episode was very good. I also liked a lot of the casting, especially Enzo Cilenti once again, and the genetically improbable Thenardier family. Really good performances all around there. I enjoyed the Waterloo opening as well.
But I do still have complaints. They are as follows:
First of all, obviously they changed a lot of small things from the book for this production. I respect that this needs to be done, but a lot of the changes just... weren't better. One that caught me early on is a scene from Fantine's storyline where one of the other girls (I think Favourite?) tells her that the men they're seeing aren't serious about them and it's just... it's a bad choice. The tone of the scene when the guys ditch them and say it's their "surprise" works because the other women, who likely assumed Fantine was on the same page, are all "LOL good joke" and get over it while Fantine sits there going "Oh shit." It's not young love or naivety anymore if she was warned and let him persuade her otherwise, it's just sad. Generally there are a lot of similar little changes that I just don't feel work very well. Some of it, as I said in an earlier post, is me being a nerd- but I don't think that all it is.
Of all the "off" parts of it, some of the very worst comes through Javert's characterization. David Oyelowo gives a hell of a performance, but they literally couldn't have made the character more one note. When in doubt, everything Javert does is about Valjean. To an extent that you wonder how Javert got up in the morning all those years Valjean was in the convent. It gets successively more cartoonish until the crowning moment, the cherry on the sundae, wherein Javert concludes that Jean Vajean must have started the June Rebellion. This is especially funny in contrast to Valjean, who seems to always live in hope that it won't be Javert. Like the students are talking about a police spy and you can see Valjean's little wheels turning, where he's like "Maybe it's not Javert, it can't always be him, that's statistically improbable... Oh, it's him, though. It's him."
Also a bit silly is the constant repetition of how Valjean stole a Coin from a Child. I know that happened, but... it's a moment for Valjean to look at himself and think, "I really have fallen far." It serves this really cool double purpose where it makes what the bishop did even more meaningful, in the sense that under slightly different circumstances it could have been for nothing, and he knew that but did it anyway, but also less meaningful in the sense that the bishop can talk all he wants about how Valjean belongs to God now, but in the end Valjean still has to make that choice himself. It's one thing the musical misses, and it's important- but not so important that you have to harp on it until it becomes a joke. I couldn't stop thinking about just how Javert, hot on the trail of the supervillain Valjean, interviewed that child.
And finally, I want to talk about the plot structure. In a way, I want to thank Andrew Davies, or whoever it was who first decided "I will make a timeline of everything that happens in this gigantic tome, and I will film it chronologically", because I've been thinking about the ideal adaptation of this book for fifteen years, and I needed to see it done like this to know that it wouldn't work. I actually really like most of Davies' adaptations (his Sense & Sensibility is good, for example, if a bit Extra- a duel, really?) and I found myself comparing this in particular to Little Dorrit, which is probably my favorite of his. The books are superficially similar- they hang around one protagonist (Valjean, Amy) but have a large cast of other characters connected often in obscure ways- and yet trying to treat them the same way falls really flat. Dickens starts with a wide net and eventually draws it tight; Hugo starts with a slender thread (so slender he spends chapters and chapters on characters you'll never see again) and eventually throws it wide enough to cover a city.
It does the story an enormous disservice to give Marius' sad background the same weight as Valjean and then Fantine's core plotline- which, by just throwing everything at you chronologically, is exactly what this adaptation does. Deliver that background as a flashback when Marius gets important, or don't have it at all. (Though I admit, it would be a shame to lose the saga of Gillenormand's maid, who's definitely the MVP of the household.) Since the story of his father gets re-explained once he's an adult anyway, it isn't critical, it's just part of this larger decision to frame Les Miserables as a sprawling ensemble piece in a way that it just isn't. These moments are not of equal importance and it muddies the waters dangerously to act as if they are. My smaller gripes about changes to the story aside, that's the main issue with this adaptation, and it's the main reason it gets better towards the end. Towards the end everything is of equal importance, and beautifully handled at that. So I'm glad I got there, but it was a bumpy road.
TL;DR I love the book, I love the musical, and I liked this adaptation toward the end and maybe overall I judged it too harshly. If you haven't seen it, please don't hesitate on my account.
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Date: 2019-05-26 12:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-05-29 12:07 am (UTC)